Yard Flamingos

by Natalie Warther

I never thought I’d be the kind of woman who buys yard flamingos, but that’s exactly what I’ve done. I saw them by the checkout in Hobby Lobby, and I thought, why not, one can’t hurt. When I got home I positioned her in the middle of the yard and stepped back to admire her.

I’d never seen anything so lonely in my whole entire life.

So I returned to Hobby Lobby and I bought two more plastic birds. These I flanked on either side of the first, orienting them slightly towards each other like siblings.

I studied them from the kitchen. The dining room. The mud room. The problem was that my flamingo family was only visible from half of the house.

So I returned to Hobby Lobby and I bought four more yard flamingos. This time I formed them in a line, each bird falling on the heels of his brother. I hurried up the stairs and into the second floor rooms. You could see some of them from the son’s room, but only half. The view from the daughter’s room was even worse.

It’s fine, I told myself, There are plenty of birds in the yard. I laid on the daughter’s bed and stared at her ceiling and opened her books and unfolded and refolded her socks because everyone was gone and she’d never even know. And that’s when I realized that there weren’t enough birds in the yard.

So I went back to Hobby Lobby on my way home from the grocery store and I bought a couple more. The check out lady gave me a look but I didn’t care about her. I rushed home excitedly, speeding into the driveway and grabbing the birds from the trunk without even closing my door.

I was running out of yard space, so I positioned these new birds in a circle around the mailbox. I also put one by the front door, and one by the garage. I rushed inside and hurried up the stairs and left all of the groceries in the car, even the eggs and the milk.

You could see my flock from every room now: The son’s room, the daughter’s room, even their old bathroom, if you knew where to look.

The spectacle was magnificent; a sea of pink necks grazing in the grass.

Now in the mornings I make my coffee and drink it by the window, waving at the neighbors and admiring my birds. They’re perfect, each of them, but especially the mother, who loves her flamingets more than words and never drops her leg.

Natalie Warther is a senior writer at 72andSunny and an M.F.A candidate at Bennington College. She is a prose reader for GASHER Journal. Her most recent fiction has appeared in X-R-A-Y, Sip Cup, and is forthcoming in the 2021 Bath Flash Fiction Award Anthology. Natalie lives in Los Angeles.